


Dog Teeth and Naked Pictures

by YoungDumbandFullofHeadcanons



Category: Original Work
Genre: Animal Death, Blood, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Gen, Gore, Grooming, Pedophilia, sexual predator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-09-12
Packaged: 2019-03-11 11:23:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13523223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YoungDumbandFullofHeadcanons/pseuds/YoungDumbandFullofHeadcanons
Summary: But I know when it ended, when Jessa Lee gave me three crumpled $10 bills and told me not to tell. She disappeared the following day, leaving behind her three bloody dogs to roam the woods like wild wolves, and I had never tried to kiss her because my mouth tasted like vomit.





	1. Dog Teeth and Naked Pictures

**Author's Note:**

> This is a draft of a short story i wrote for class in between posting chapters on my fanfic,,,,, I always welcome feedback <3

Madyson Willoughby

Dog Teeth and Naked Pictures

I couldn’t say when it began, or when anything began really. It was always going on, one thing feeding into another, joining up, separating, flowing into the next, and so on. Like a thousand little creeks flowing into streams that flow into rivers, until it all ends at the ocean. At that age, everything seemed like that. Days bled into each other, one school grade was like the last, every year you didn’t feel any older on your birthday. The only markers of the passage of time were how many baby teeth you had and the price of candy bars at the corner store.

But I know when it ended, when Jessa Lee gave me three crumpled $10 bills and told me not to tell. She disappeared the following day, leaving behind her three bloody dogs to roam the woods like wild wolves, and I had never tried to kiss her because my mouth tasted like vomit.

If I could plot time and age like points on a map, I would put a pin around the year I was eleven. I two baby teeth left in the very back and my twelve-year molars were just starting to break through the pink flesh of my gums. My favorite candy at the gas-station had gone up to 50¢. So yes, eleven sounds right, maybe the spring before, or the fall after.

A long series of leaving and returning and coming and going and the front door slamming shut and opening up over and over and over, finally ended when Daddy left for the last time. That cycle of back-and-forth was another river on the map, a constant flow that never began but had built up over time, until it definitively ended at the great sea that was him never coming back. So Mom got another job and took extra shifts waiting tables, living by the vow _“I ain’t never ever letting that man in this house again. I don’t care he says or what he does. No. Never again.”_

But this meant I was learning how to be a big brother and a father and a mother all at once, and I can’t say that I was ever very good at it.

My brother was a year younger, and he had been going crazy for a while now. The doctor thought it was because he fell down the stairs some years ago, but me, Mom, and Daddy knew it had been going on for long before that. Maybe that fall had made it worse, but it never really started anywhere. He wasn’t crazy crazy, he just couldn’t sit still or listen when you talked to him. Or if he did listen he’d latch on to something you’d said and repeat it back like a mockingbird, again and again until it didn’t mean anything anymore. When he was content, he was affectionate, kisses and hugs and cuddles all day long, and a chatterbox about the things he liked. But if he was upset, it was a full kicking-screaming-crying tantrum that could knock pictures off the walls and wake every neighbor on the block. And often he would come out of those fits with big self-inflicted bruises or scratches along his neck and face.

Mom certainly didn’t know how to cure this behavior, she was barely around anymore. So what was I supposed to do? Sometimes I would hold him down, leaning into my superior weight and size, only to end up as bruised and bloody as he was. Other times, I would scream back at him _“Fucking shut up! Stop it! You’re gonna wake up the baby, just stop it!”_ But then I was screaming and he would still be screaming the baby would wake up screaming. At times like that, I felt like we were the only people in the world. There was no room for anyone else because it was all full of noise and fear and anger.

The baby was my sister, though if I was eleven then she wasn’t really a baby anymore. Stumbling around on stocky legs and saying half-words if you prompted her, she was just old enough to maybe start being her own person, but she still slept in a crib and cried if no one picked her up. During the day, Mom would leave her with a lady that ran a daycare out of her living room, but I was the designated babysitter in the evening. Which is when most of those screaming matches occurred.

It all seemed practical at the time. Who else could watch the baby? Jack’s old enough, isn’t he? Wasn’t I? And while I never shucked my responsibility, it always felt like a heavy pull, dragging my limbs down and anchoring me to the floor like I was a captive of the house. And that feeling was coupled with this deep burning dread in my gut. Like when a mouse is caught in a shoebox and runs from one side to the other, back and forth and back and forth until its frantic heart gives out. And it dies there, in the dark, little feet still jumping with the ghost of panic and snout stuck out like it’s still sniffing for escape.

My one relief, in the small space of time between walking my brother home from school and our mother leaving for her late-shift, was when I would go to the gas-station down the road with any pocket change I had to buy candy. Other kids often the same, this was the only store that had more than cheap tootsie-rolls and dum-dums, so afterschool it was abuzz with anyone between the ages of seven and fourteen. And I would say _“hi”_ to boys from my class, and someone would invite me to play tag or go to the park, but I didn’t have the luxury of time.

Sometimes I didn’t have any money but would go anyway, hunting the streets for any lonely quarters or dimes on the ground. Or I would just go in and look at the shelves of chocolate bars and bubble gum and pixie-sticks. No one ever dared steal anything, because the owner had eyes like a hawk and big meaty hands that would leave bruises if he grabbed you by the arm while you slipped something in your pocket.

There was of course, one way to make money if you were a kid and had none. It was an unspoken but widely known truth in the neighborhood that if you let Mr. Newman take pictures of you naked, then he would give you money. No parents ever knew, because we were hip to the idea that if nobody found out, then we could keep making easy cash. We were young enough that we didn’t care about being naked, and we didn’t know what he wanted pictures of us for. But we felt like entrepreneurs, running a business with one customer and an endless profit. Two pictures, boy or girl, pants and underwear down and shirt lifted up, front and back, got you a crisp $1 bill and a polite “thank you” from the old man.

He used to give out candy instead, but after an injury to his knee, getting out to buy it was hard to do, so he just started giving children money to buy their own. That was something he would say while you got naked, just odd small-talk he would make while peering over his camera through thick glasses. Not many people I knew had a camera, but his was different than any other I’d seen. Big and bulky and it would spit out the picture right after he took it. He’d show you the photos too, while you pulled your clothes back on, asking what you thought of them. Then you’d wait patiently for him to find his wallet in the clutter of his living room and then be sent on your way with money. Always with the gentle reminder _“Don’t tell anyone. Our secret, right?”_

_“Yes Mister.”_

I only did it a few times, like when I really _really_ wanted a candy bar or said I would bring one home for my brother, but Mr. Newman was persistent. Every day I would walk by his house and he’d be sitting out on the porch, book in hand and icy glass of lemonade on the banister.

_“Ho’ya doing Jack? Why don’t you come in for a spell? Tell me, how’s your brother? How old’s your sister now? Comm’on in, you have time, don’t ch’ya?”_

_“Not today Mister, I gotta be home soon.”_

_“Oh well, maybe another time. You get on, you’re a good kid. Well hey there Charlie, how ‘bout you…”_

And it would continue on like a parade of kids, until one of us wanted to make a buck and would be added to Newman’s photo collection.

On the walk back from the gas-station, I would take the side road that led behind the shut-down steel mill to the edge of the woods, and sometime I could see Jessa Lee out with her dogs. She was older, not by much but enough to matter, and I was in love with her.

What does an eleven-year-old know about love? Maybe more than you’d think, but mostly it’s about everything around that person that makes you love them, not the person themselves. So Jessa was quiet and I never knew her that well, but she did things like hang out by the woods and let her dogs run through the brush. She smoked cheap cigarettes and blew the acrid smoke into your face if you stood too close. She taught me new cuss words and said her dad already showed her how to drive. Everything around her, the air and the trees and the earth, looked like freedom to me, so that’s why I fell in love with her.

Jessa had these big feral wolf dogs, three of them, with sharp teeth and chain collars around their thick necks. And she was this little bird-boned rail-thin girl, because she didn’t usually have food to eat and the only fat on her was in her puffy lips and baby-cheeks, but she was the pack leader. One of those beasts outweighed her by half, three could rip her too shreds, but they heeled to her call without fault.

While her dad was working at the lumber yard, she would let the dogs loose in the woods under her watchful eye, and she’d stay there waiting at the tree-line for hours. One time I got too close, thinking about talking to her but too nervous to do it, and one of those dogs came barreling at me faster than a bullet. I froze in place, watching the way its hind legs jumped up like a bull-frog and pounced forward like a rabbit, and it got so close that I could see the glisten of drool on its teeth and the creases in its snout.

Right before I became dogfood, Jessa whistled through her fingers a shrill cry that halted the dog in its attack. It stayed poised to leap though, back arched and head down, gnashing it’s fangs at me, until Jessa grabbed its collar and hauled the dog backwards. I could feel my heart hammering in my chest as the fear stayed with me, near bouts pissing myself if the dog even looked at me sideways.

She didn’t apologize, just clutched her dog to keep it back, and said;

_“He doesn’t like boys.”_

_“Why?”_

_“He’s smart.”_

From then on it was easier to approach Jessa, because she always knew I was near when that dog started barking at me. The other two didn’t like me much either, though one gave me a thorough sniffing all over and then turned away with a snarl. But they let me get closer to their alpha each time I visited, until I could sit beside Jessa on the beams of an old fence and watch the dogs with her.

Someone at school had spread a rumor that she had flees from sleeping with her dogs, but I could never confirm if it was true. I could get close but not that close, and only rarely would we talk.

She once told me that I acted older than I was, and I preened like it was a compliment. If I was older, or acted older, maybe Jessa would like me back. But that’s not what she meant.

_“You act like a mom.”_

Because I had told her about taking care of my brother and sister and how I figured out how to do laundry all on my own. And sometimes I’d ask if she was hungry because her stomach was growling.

_“Not really.”_

My mom was never around. To me, acting like a mom meant working too much. And Jessa didn’t even have a mom, so what did she know?

_“That one. Her.”_

Jessa pointed to one of her dogs, the silvery one with white spots on her neck. It was the one who had sniffed me out the first time.

_“She’s the mama.”_

I watched that dog, noticing how she would do little things like nip at the boy-dogs and howl when they ran too far off, ears perked up for a distant response. And when Jessa would whistle for them, that one would always come right away and nuzzle her open palm.

How many times I sat with Jessa on the fence, I didn’t count. But I was riding that steady flow from stream to river to ocean, one with the current as I went from liking her to loving her all at once.

  
One afternoon in the small window of time to do the two things I enjoyed, buy candy and see Jessa, I wanted to get something for her too. Strapped for cash, I went over to Mr. Newman’s house and let him take some pictures.

He took the photos like normal and gave me my hard-earned dollar, but on my way out he said something strange.

_“Getting older, aren’t you Jack?”_

_“I guess.”_

He was looking at the pictures he took, but I had seen them and knew what he was talking about. Sometime in the summer, itchy, wiry hair had started to grow around my groin. Maybe when you got older, you stopped counting baby teeth and instead measured the amount hair you’ve grow down there.

_“Hm. Time sure does fly, doesn’t it? Your brother never comes by, does he?_

I felt a sharp twist in my stomach. I had done this half a dozen times and known kids who done it more, but the thought of my angry, crying, touchy-feely, crazy little brother taking naked pictures just didn’t sit right with me.

_“No, he doesn’t come by this way.”_

_“Don’t you think he’d like to make some money too?”_

_“Um, no he isn’t- like,”_

I reached up and tapped my temple, the way adults do when they don’t want to say insane. My hand was shaking and clammy for some reason.

_“…all there.”_

_“Oh… well maybe you could do it with him. Together.”_

Newman said it so immediately, like it’d been done before, like he had already thought it over.

_“I gotta go Mister, I’m gonna be late.”_

_“Oh you be on your way then, and think about what I said. Don’t spend it all in one place, do well in school, mind your mother, all that jazz.”_

With little time to spare, I rushed up to the store. I was outside, alone and breathing brisk air, but felt like I was still in that dark cluttered living room. I had my clothes back on, but still felt naked and exposed. It was like that camera lens was still pointed at me, the flash clear and bright as the sun in my mind’s eye. Trapping an image of me inside the white-border of the Polaroid, keeping me at that age forever, just between childhood and adolescence. Stacking up with the other photos of me, of everybody I knew, in big towers of naked pictures that held up the sky.

That feeling faded but never went away, similar to the way I felt going home to watch my siblings every day. Jittery, dread filled, nervous, and under those, maybe even angry. Someone had told me that Newman would give you more money if you did other stuff for him. Naked stuff. But I was always too shy to ask. All I ever needed was a dollar anyway.

I bought two candy bars with that money and then set off to find Jessa at her usual spot. She greeted me with a bob of her head and then flicked a dead cigarette butt to the grass. The candy bars were burning a hole in my coat pocket and I wanted to say something to her. Tell her I got her something, or how I had been thinking about her all day, but no words came out of my open mouth.

She stared at my empty face until I felt stupid, so I shut my lips and fished the candy out from my pocket. I held one out and when she took it, for a second our fingers brushed together and it was almost everything I’d ever wanted, except her hand was freezing cold.

Years went by, and I still thought about that brief contact and how icy her skin was, and how I wished I would’ve had the courage to hold her hand and warm it up. Of all the things, that was what I always regretted. Like everything after wouldn’t have happened if I had only laced her slim fingers in my chubby ones for a few minutes, just so she wouldn’t be cold anymore.

But instead we dug into our chocolate with eager mouths. My brain was still distracted by my missed opportunity, so I ate slow and tried to look at Jessa through the corner of my eye. She ate like she’d been starving for days, or weeks maybe, just absolutely ravenous and swallowing big bites all at once. And then she threw the wrapper to the dirt beside her cigarette butt and licking extra chocolate from her fingers.

_“Do you like those?”_

My bar was still mostly there, only with a couple bites taken out.

Jessa nodded, making some noise of _mhm_ with her mouth stuffed full.

_“They’re my favorite.”_

She probably didn’t care, but I wanted to tell her so anyway. I also wanted her to know that she was my favorite person out of the whole world, but I couldn’t say that.

The dogs came by to sniff the chocolate left on her hands, and she let them lick the smudges off with their wide pink tongues. The boy, the one that had come at me with the intent to kill, strutted over to my feet and just flopped down on his stomach, not even caring that I was there. The smaller boy wandered lazily amongst the tree line, while the mama-dog let Jessa scratch behind her ears. We were all quiet, the forest was too, no birds or bees or swaying trees, and I was still thinking about holding Jessa’s hand.

_“Where’d you get the money?”_

_“Huh?”_

_“Those’re expensive.”_

Maybe that bar is a little pricier than regular candy. But not by much.

_“I guess.”_

_“So where’d you get the money.”_

_“Um.”_

I didn’t want to tell Jessa about the naked pictures. Living in this town, going to our school, she must have known about it, but I didn’t want to say it out loud. The word naked might’ve made me burst into flames, if the heat under my skin was any indicator.

So I tilted my head back and nudged my shoulder in the direction of the house down the road.

_“Ya’ know.”_

After a moment she nodded, looking down at the ground with her lips quirked to the side. Thinking about it, I didn’t know if she had ever done any pictures for him, but I certainly wasn’t going to ask. If I did, she might have punched me in the face, or let one of her dogs eat my leg.

Jessa didn’t like people, she didn’t talk to anyone at school and spent her days looking out into the forest alone. She wouldn’t have liked being in that dark living room, talking to an old man about mundane things while posing nude for his camera. _She wouldn’t do it,_ I said to myself, and thinking about Jessa naked also made a weird feeling swirl in my stomach.

More time passed, real soon I’d have to walk home and start my evening of babysitting and brother-keeping, but I didn’t want to go just yet.

_“Daddy says if Mama gets puppies by next year, we can’t keep ‘em.”_

I nodded along and looked at Jessa’s dog to see if she was carrying heavy around the gut.

_“He’s gonna sell them, but if she has enough you can have one.”_

_“My mom won’t let me have a dog.”_

Looking back, I know now that it wasn’t about me. What Jessa was saying was that she really wanted to keep those puppies. And if I had one, it’d be the same as if she kept it, because I was just as much at her beck and call as the rest of the pack.

_“Might not happen though, she doesn’t let him mount up on her anymore. She might be done for good.”_

Jessa paws her mama-dog’s ears mournfully, glaring at the dog at my feet like it’s his fault.

_“But if not.”_

_“Yeah, okay.”_

If Jessa wanted me to have a puppy, then I was going to have a puppy.

Nothing ever came of it though. That old bitch never had any more babies, and Jessa never had the chance to lose them.

There was some cry from the between the trees, high and yippy like my sister sounds when she wants her binky. A pale blond coyote appeared from the brush, running with the small boy-dog hot on its tail. The other dogs took up the chase too. The other boy dashed forth on powerful legs, and the mama made a wide loop around the trees to block the critter’s escape. It staggered back and forth, swift and sly but trapped between the big dogs caging it in.

I looked over at Jessa, waiting for her whistle to call them off, but she was just watching with her fingers in her mouth, absently chewing on her fingernails.

The dogs closed in on their prey, jaws snapping at its every turn, until one lunged forward and caught the coyote by a hind leg. It screamed, not like any animal I’d ever heard, it screamed like a person, as the dog latched on tight and shook back and forth until a chunk of fur and flesh tore off. The coyote jumped when it was liberated, whining pitifully and holding its injured leg to up to its underbelly. It wasn’t free for long, the mama-dog went in next, setting her sharp teeth in the creature’s throat and putting a heavy paw on in its back.

The coyotes was screaming out that _ahow ahow ahow_ sound that you hear babies make when they cry themselves to sleep. That repetitive cry in the darkness when no one comes to rescue them, and they just exhaust their lungs until they drop. It made that exact noise, clear as day, until the mama locked her jaw and snapped its thin little neck.

The dogs tugged back and forth on its limp legs until the joints finally broke and the skin ripped open to reveal raw muscles and glossy bones beneath. The stomach and breast got torn open next, with fragile ribs crunching as the pack feasts and blood spurting out like a weak geyser as the heart was pierced by long fangs. A mess of guts were dragged out into the light, in shades of green and pink and purple, and glistening with slime as the dogs swallowed them whole.

My stomach turned when the odor reaches us, smelling like blood and rot mixed with the fertile scent of the earth and freshly fallen rain, but Jessa didn’t flinch. When one of the dogs went for the coyote’s head, I covered my eyes just before the skull shattered in those strong jaws.

Small scavenger birds flew down and perched on high tree branches, waiting for their turn to pick the carcass clean, and flies started buzzing in circles over the area. The dogs were energetic but focused, heads down and tails swaying as they devoured their meal. Blood and dirt caked their muzzles and stained their coats. And amongst their grey fur and black eyes and red jaws, their sharp white teeth shone like flashbulbs in the dark.

Jessa watched them, I was still floundering between watching her and then looking at the dogs and then looking away and then back to her, but she watched with rapt attention and no revulsion. She caught me looking, I was probably pale and green around the gills, and she said;

_“They got’ta eat.”_

I nodded because I didn’t know what else to do. When my eyes trailed back to the dogs, I watched as the mama-dog licked hunks of flesh and entrails of the others’ snouts. The half-eaten candy was melting in its rapper as I clutched it with a sweaty hand. Looking down at it, I lost my appetite. It looked more like a line of thin intestines than the chocolate bar it was before, and it was seeping out caramel filling that looked like blood.

Turning back to Jessa, she’s was still looking at me, studding the way I sat and breathed and gears that turned in my head. The same way she watched her dogs when they were on the attack. After a moment of a silent staring contest, I offered her the rest of the candy bar and she took it in a firm hand. I looked toward the ground again and cocked my head to the side, so that the vulnerable swath of my neck was bared to Jessa’s penetrating gaze.

She ate the rest of the candy and licked her fingers clean, and I had to leave soon after. The dogs had finished their meal and were lounging at our feet, content with full belles and bloody fur.

That night, the baby banged her head on the coffee table and cried for three hours. I held her through it, rocking her back and forth in a jerky rhythm, and let my brother draw in my school notebook just to keep him from throwing a hissy fit. We all fell asleep on the couch together, and when Mom got home from work she didn’t herd us to our beds.

  
The next day I felt strange, like everything was moving at a pace I couldn’t keep up with. A harsh buzz muffled my hearing like radio static, and my eyes couldn’t focus on the words on the blackboard. At lunch, I sat with some boys from my class, but when I went to eat my sandwich, my gut twisted up like it was laundry being rung out. The nausea never passed, it was a constant push and pull and flex and clench in my stomach muscles, and then my energy sagged without food.

By the time school got out I didn’t even want any candy, sugar seemed like it would feel like acid on my throat. So I walked a straight over to the woods instead. As I went, I wondered if dogs got stomach aches too, or if they could just eat anything, any creature, and wag their tails after. That was something Jessa would know. Maybe she would rub her dogs’ soft bellies and hum to them, like my mom used to when I got sick. Or maybe she had seen them swallow whole rabbits and squirrels whole, alive and screeching, and then afterwards they were just fine.

I walked past Newman’s house on the way, but he wasn’t there on the porch to say “Hello” or invite me in. In the front window the curtains were drawn, as they always were, dark and heavy to keep all the daylight out of the living room. His typical glass of lemonade was still sitting on the banister though, mostly full and weeping condensation as the ice melted.

The rhythm of my steps on the sidewalk vibrated up my bones and echoed in my skull, until it became a pounding ache between my temples. The static-y noise in my ear had faded, but there was still a dull ring that drowned out all other sound, like I had been underwater too long.

As I approached the edge of the woods, the concrete transitioned into hard packed earth and the blue shadows of fir trees were cast over me. But I when I get to her spot, Jessa wasn’t there. The old rotted fence was just swaying gently in the breeze without her to anchor it down. I waited, and waited, and waited.

Jessa’s house was way up the backroads and across the train tracks, and the foliage around that land was swampy and dying in the cold weather. Maybe she was just late letting her dogs out to run, so I waited some more. The crashing waves of nausea in my stomach ebbed and flowed until it finally settled. My hands were numb and my nose was runny and pink, but I stuck by the fence. Just another moment, I thought, any time now.

But just before I had to give in and go home, a low howl called out from behind the trees. A chorus of cries followed, deep and mournful as the noise traveled on the wind. I couldn’t see them, the forest was thick and the brush was still with no motion within, but I knew the dogs were out there.

The sky had just begun to haze over into dusk, a small change in luminescence behind the grey clouds that cast a pale grey tint on everything. The dogs would quiet down for a few minutes at a time, and then their voices would rise up in a canon of moans. They were calling out to her, but Jessa’s didn’t answer.

I listened to the symphony with eager ears, trying to distinguish one dog from another by tone alone, but their voices all blended into one haunting cry.

_“Ahwwoooo.”_

Some people have commands, like sit and shake and roll over, but Jessa had whistles and she didn’t bother with those useless tricks for her dogs. The ones I knew were come, earsplittingly high and fired off in rapid succession, and heel, long like a train whistle and loud enough shock you where you stood.

I put my fingers to my chapped up lips, setting the tips just on the edge of my teeth like I‘d seen Jessa do, and blew with a lung full of air. No noise came out, and a mess of slobber ended up on my fingers. I tried again, wiping my hand on my pants, and then switched to my left when it still didn’t work. Jessa made this look easy.

So I couldn’t whistle, not even a faint tune or squeak, but the dogs still howled out to an audience of one. It was like a telephone I couldn’t answer, but I had to listen to it ring anyway and wonder what the message was. And what then came over me, I don’t know, but I cupped my hands over my mouth and howled back at the dogs.

There was a pause in the air, punctuated by the echo of my cry, as the dogs fell silent. I could imagine their soft ears perk up, wet noses sniff toward the wind, broad foreheads furrow in primal thought, and then they answered me.

_“Ahwwoooo.”_

We howled in tandem, I would listen to them, they would listen to me, until we synced into one massive sound. The dogs never emerged from the forest, but their voices spoke to some hidden instinct in my brain, dormant for eons but still sharp when stimulated. It made me more aware of the scent of the earth, the bite of the cold air, and the subtle movements in the brush.

The sun began to set and I was as close to late as I’d ever been. Any longer and Mama would have tanned my ass up one street and down the next. My hindbrain slowly turned off as thoughts of responsibility and obligation took over, and I lost my connection to that wild soundwave. I tried to hang on to it, log that noise and mood and feeling in my memory, and then howled one last time to say goodbye. It sounded flat, but I think they understood.

That night I slept in fits and spurts, waking for an hour at a time and staring out my bedroom window until my eyes ached from the strain.

  
Jessa had returned the following day, but even from a distance I could tell something was off. She sat on the cold ground with her back against the fence, and all the dogs were circled around like a barricade. As I got closer, the dogs locked their eyes on me and watched for any reason to lunge.

There was something in her lap, a brown paper bag marked by grease stains and faded logos, and she was chewing big bites of a cheese burger. She ate slow like a cow grazing on grass, jaw moving constantly and going in for another bite before swallowing the first. Despite the dogs’ keen awareness, Jessa showed no sign that she knew I was there until I sat down right beside her.

_“Hey.”_

Instead of speaking, she tilted the open end of the bag towards me. Inside was a ridiculous amount of foil wrapped burgers and spilled fries from the fast-food place up the street. That much food must have cost at least $10, maybe $15, an unattainable amount of money for Jessa any day of the year.

_“Eat.”_

I didn’t want to, but grabbed a burger anyway. It had gone lukewarm and the cheese stuck like rubber to the wrapping. My teeth sunk in with no resistance, the texture was mealy and soft and tasted overwhelmingly of yellow mustard and salt.

Jessa ate hers and another one by the time I finished mine, and then she insisted I have another. I tried to shake my head, mouth still full of bread and crumbly meat, but the dark glare in her eyes didn’t let me refuse. Unwrapping another, I took pauses to shove bundles of limp fries in my mouth and choke down the clumps of dry potato and gooey ketchup.

The dogs watched with rapt attention, but Jessa just scarfed more bites into her mouth.

_“Where-”_

Did she get this, I meant to ask. Jessa didn’t even have lunches to eat at school.

A deep rumble rose up, and I thought it was one of the dogs eying my half eaten burger, but their ears jumped up and looked over at Jessa. She was hunched forward, eyes cast down and teeth bared in a grimace, and she was squeezing the burger until it wept drips of grease that rolled down her hands. The growl died into a low whine and then hiccupped into a whimper.

_“I was hungry.”_

Her jaw finally unlocked, I could see the corners of her eyes glisten.

_“I didn’t it know was gonna be like that.”_

She went in for another bite, chewed for a moment, and then spit the mass of food to the ground. One dog swiped its tongue over the dirt and gobbled it up real quick, swallowing the bite in one slurp.

_“It hurt.”_

Jessa was always hungry, and there was one way for kids to make money in this town.

The mouthful I had turned rancid, and when it touched the back of my throat it made me gag and spit it all out in a wet pile of half-chewed burger and bile. The dogs came over and ate it from the ground. My limbs filled with ice, bones stiffening and muscles seizing up like dead bodies do when they lie there long enough.

From the corner of my vision, I watched Jessa toss the leftover burger to her dogs and let them lick the oil from her fingers. And then she let her mama-dog lick the tears from her face.

I threw my meal to the dogs too. There was a trail mapping out in my mind, every event from when I first spoke to Jessa to now. To when I bought her candy. To when her dogs ate that screaming coyote. To when she wasn’t here yesterday and left her dogs in the woods. All the little drops that coalesced into puddles and flowed downwards into streams and so on, every event stacking together and moving into the present. Until it was an unstoppable force of the inevitable. I wanted to put up walls, dams to block the flow and keep us stagnant, but we were already plummeting toward the ocean.

Jessa dumped the bag off her lap and burgers and fries spill in a heap. With her permission the dogs tore into the paper and the foil, snuffing out the food within and swallowing big chunks of meat and bread without having to chew.

_“Tomorrow,”_

She was sinking, body slumping down into the dirt and shoulders hunching, and had her fingers in her mouth. Her nails were already bitten down into bloody pink nubs with dead skin flaking off, but she just kept gnawing on them.

_“Jessa-”_

_“No.”_

She was speaking in this low, harsh tone that commanded me to listen.

_“Tomorrow, you go over there and you get him to come here.”_

_“Jess-”_

_“Alone. You got’ta bring him here alone.”_

The pupils of her eyes shifted from blown out and dull to tight and focuses, accented by the irritation and plumped veins in the whites.

_“J-”_

_“And when you hear it, you run.”_

Her voice was choppy by then, garbled from strain and crumbling like the first tumbles of a rock slide.

_“Hear what?”_

She tipped her head back and looked up at the sky, like she was taking her last breath of air before plunging back into to the depths of dark water. And then she turned her neck to look at me. There were these light lavender bruises on her face, about the size of nickels and greenish around the edges. Four in a row along her cheek and one oblong shape on the opposite corner of her mouth, like a constellation that told more than which way was north.

_“You’ll know.”_

_“Okay.”_

  
The path from school seemed to stretch out empty and into the horizon for miles and miles and miles, but every step passed in a blur as I walked with the frantic pace of my heart. More than ever, I counted every second of every minute, knowing what time exactly I would need to get to Newman’s house, when to meet Jessa, and when to be home. The short timeframe would last for ages though, and it would leave a series of vivid imprints on my mind.

_“How’ya doing Jack? You looking to come in for a bit?”_

Mr. Newman looked just the same as always, the lens of his glasses gleaming in the afternoon sun as he reclined on the porch swing.

_“Um, Mister, I can’t today. But can you come with me?”_

He leaned forward, a natural hunch to his shoulders and paunch in his middle, and he looked at me curiously.

_Lie,_ Jessa had told me, _say whatever you got to._

_“Jessa, you know, Jessa Lee? She wants to do stuff, for money again.”_

He set his glass down on the banister and for the first time I noticed how large his hands were, how wide his fingertips had been when they held that camera and pressed the shutter-button.

_“I thought me and her could do pictures. Together. And other stuff, maybe.”_

There was no one out on the sidewalk, but Newman had neighbors and cars were cruising down the road at languid speeds, so he couldn’t show how interested he really was.

_“But you gotta come this way, Jessa said so.”_

_“Where to now?”_

_“Down by the woods, behind the old mill building. Nobody’s gon'na be around.”_

Except maybe once or twice, I had never seen the man leave the barrier of his front porch, but after a moment of thought, he heaved himself up and onto his feet.

_“Hold on a minute, let me grab a couple things.”_

I waited as he went into the house, screen door swinging in the breeze as I rolled back and forth on my feet. Newman returned with his camera hanging from its strap around his neck and a cane in his hand, and when he locked up the door behind him, I saw the outline of his wallet in his jacket pocket.

On the walk there, my insides were all tangled up in tight knots and my head was down towards the ground. I could feel little beads of cold sweat run down from my temples and across my cheeks and leave a sticky trail behind. Every few minutes I would pop my head up like a groundhog and look around quickly, checking to make sure nobody was around to see.

By this time Mr. Newman must have been used to nervous kids wearing holes in the ground with their eyes, because he just hobbled along beside me with his cane making a dull _clack_ when it hit the pavement and his camera swinging heavy against his chest. He made casual chit-chat, the way he would when I was in his living room, but with the physical exertion it was broken up by rough pants for breath.

_“You and that girl, huh Jack?”_

_“She’s my friend.”_

I don’t know if Jessa ever saw it that way, or if she thought I was just some little kid that followed her around like a lost puppy begging to be welcomed into her pack.

_“Girls like that, they never grow up. Boy, she’s a keeper.”_

_“I guess.”_

It was odd to think about then, but now I often picture Jessa grown up and wonder if she would look the same. If I could be out somewhere, early morning or late at night, and look across the bar or street or interstate, and recognize the quirk of her mouth or the storm in her eyes. After ten, twenty, thirty years or more, would she still be Jessa and would I know?

_“And that father of hers isn’t around much either. You really know how to pick ‘em.”_

_“Okay.”_

The knot in my stomach tightened up in one uncomfortable cramp, but I kept on leading the old man down from the sidewalks to the dirt roads that went to Jessa’s hiding spot.

_“You don’t know what I‘m talking about, do ya’? Don’t worry, give it a couple years.”_

I didn’t know, but I was right on the cusp of almost knowing.

The sun began to wane in the sky and the daylight shifted to a soft golden glow, contrasted by the dark shadows cast by the looming evergreens. I walked along the wall of the abandoned mill and Newman followed after. He was slow due to the rough terrain of hard dirt and gravel, but soon we rounded the corner and the tree-line splayed out before us, with the building at our backs’ guarding us from sight.

My nails left these little pink crevices in the fleshy parts of my palms that had scabbed into dark little scars and remained for weeks. It was like I could feel ever gust of air, every stumble on sharp rocks and pinprick in my skin. I could feel everything seep into my skin, like rain into earth, and it would crawl into my bloodstream and travel toward my racing heart, until I was just own big aching pulse all over.

And there was Jessa, standing just a short distance away, by that old fence that would one day crumple with age and rot and be eaten to dust by carpenter-ants and fungus. She was clutching the ends of her sweater sleeves, knuckles white and fists shaking, and her feet were dug into the dirt below for stability.

Newman hobbled up a few more steps and stopped beside me, but he was looking at her. The glare from his glasses made it so I couldn’t see his eyes, so instead I watched as the camera sung around his neck, steady like a metronome, counting down its last few seconds before it settled into stillness.

And then in the distance, so low and quiet that I doubt anyone but Jessa and I could ever hear it, a howl called out from the forest. There’s a rustling deep in the lush foliage, from the east, from the west, and then coming closer. I looked up just in time to see Jessa press her fingers into her mouth, in my peripheral I saw Newman cock his head to one side, and then the sharp note rang through the air.

It was different than her other commands, deeper, louder, like a police siren or fire alarm, and it wound up, up, up, until it peaked at this high screech that could have broken glass, and then relaxed with a desperate breath of air.

_You’ll know._

I did, and I ran. The sound triggered some fight or flight instinct that drove my muscles into motion, but I didn’t run away, I sprinted as fast as I could towards Jessa. I could feel the world tumbling forward and the ground disappearing behind me, just as a flash of silver white fur passed by my face and I heard a chilling growl right beside my ear.

Jessa caught me before I plunged headfirst into the fence, one of her arms barring across my stomach and the other wrapping around my shoulders to pull me backwards. The inertia throwing me down fought her hold, but she held her ground and hauled me back up. Twisting my torso around like I was a limp sack, she held me against her front so I had to watch.

Her dogs had appeared from the shadows, backs arched and heads down as they sprinted towards Newman, and he barely gave us a look of shock and fear before they pounced on him. One dog, I couldn’t tell which because they were moving so fast in one big furry blur, lunged up with sharp claws and open jaws, and sunk its teeth into the old man’s neck. He fell to the earth with a hard thump and a scream, and the other dogs latched on to his limbs and tossed their head back and forth. First they tore off layers of clothing into ragged scraps, and then went after the doughy flesh underneath, until pulses of blood are shooting out from the punctures.

He was screaming, for help, for God, for anybody, and fought against the big dogs with weak arms and legs. The dog at his throat, now painted from its snout and chest with blood, beat a paw over his face and its claws left a big swath of gashes from one cheek to the other.

I looked around every edge of my vision to see if someone was near, if someone was around to hear or see, but we were alone. The arms around me held firmly but not painfully in place, and Jessa had her chin hooked over my shoulder so she could watch.

In the attack, the strap of the camera got bitten and pulled for leverage and then snapped under the strain. The dog tossed the useless bite away and went in for a meatier piece of his inner arm, so the camera got thrown to the side. It was kicked around several times as the dogs worked in tandem to tear Newman apart, until the old device finally tumbles over to my feet.

Two dogs ganged up on one leg while the other bit into his shoulder, shattering the bone in its jaw and then moving up to bite his ear off and swallow the bloody chunk. The pair were tearing off shreds of flesh and muscle in wide ribbons, taking only short breaks to choke down meat and pant for breath. Their wide tongues hung out and dripped with blood, and then they’d rip another bite off. When they got to the dewy white bones within, they moved on to the other leg, and then the arms, working their way in towards the middle.

The screaming now was constant and rung in my ears like white noise. Jessa’s hands were petting me, rubbing soothing circles into my arm and side, and I could feel her breath against my ear.

_“Shhh shhh shhh”_

And then I realized that I was screaming too, and she was whispering to me.

_“Be quiet. Someone will hear. Be quiet Jack.”_

So I shut my lips tight and held them closed with my teeth, and we watched in silence as the dogs kept tearing Mr. Newman apart.

Blood was pouring out from every end, soaking into the crevices of the dirt and fertilizing the earth, staining that patch of land dark red like clay for years to come. Muscles, tendons, bits of broken bone and cartilage, were all pulled out of his body and eaten up by the hungry dogs. And then they tore the stomach open and it spilled out a puddle of pail fat, and the dogs dug into his organs. It looked like the coyote’s insides, dark shades of greens and purples and slimy with blood, but even bigger. One dog got a hold on some intestines and yanked them out like endless rope, baring its feet into the ground and tugging until the hose was stretched out and severed from its home.

The dogs were covered too, faces painted in dirt and blood like warriors, but still they went in for more and more and more. Their big teeth shone with every swipe of their tongues and snap of their jaws, glistening in the fading light as drool rolled down their gums and jowls. The teeth stood out so clear, sharp as any knife and seemingly twice as lethal, because they were wielded by beasts that could eat someone alive. A knife could kill you, but those jaws could make you into a meal.

At some point, a broken rib must have punctured Newman’s lung or the indents in his neck had been seeping blood inwards instead of outwards, because the only noises he was making were a few wet choking gasps. And then he went silent.

The soothing hands on me changed into stiff fists and Jessa’s shushing had morphed into a heavy huffing breath through her teeth. Her chest rumbled her lips pulled back into a snarl, and up so close with her face right beside mine, it seemed like she had dog teeth too. They were short and met in a dull point at the tip, but they gleamed white like a predator’s, and I knew that those teeth could kill too.

With the body limp and the man once there dead, the dogs calmed in their feeding frenzy. Now they picked at the entrails, licked bones clean of fibers, lapped up puddles of blood that pooled in the dirt, and then waddled over with heavy bellies and dripping muzzles. The crows and bugs would scavenge for the next few days, and then in a few weeks someone would stumble upon the bones and call the police.

Jessa let me go, wiping her red cheeks and rolling a glob of spit in her mouth until she spat it to the dirt. The dogs came up to us, content and lovingly nuzzling our hands with their bloody noses. I flinched away, the smell of iron and death heavy on their fur, but Jessa rubbed their necks and ears and cooed at them.

_“Good boy; good girl; good, so good; good dog.”_

I stumbled over the camera on the ground. The dark plastic case was covered in grime and the lens was caked in blood. As I picked it up with shaking hands, the inside rattled with a thick roll polaroid film ready and waiting to be dispensed. I fingered over the edges, around the circle of the lens and up the ridge along the top, to the shutter-button in the far corner. I tried not to think of the dead body a few feet away, instead I thought about the old man who had pressed this button a million times. The old man who took pictures of me, who took pictures of my friends, who had wanted me to bring my brother to him, who had put those purple marks on Jessa’s face. The old man who was eaten alive by feral dogs at the command of a girl that would never grow up.

I felt her eyes on me, all their eyes, as I held the camera. Jessa and her dogs watched me with dark engorged pupils that saw my every breath, every involuntary twitch of my limbs, and every roll of my stomach as the smell of death made me ill. They were ready, teeth bared and shoulders hunched, to strike at any moment.

Camera in hand, I held Jessa’s gaze for as long as I could, until she finally overwhelmed me, wore me down into my very deepest instincts and wants. I raised the camera above my head and threw it to the ground. It didn’t shatter, my young strength no match for the work of factory mechanics, but as it impacted the hard-packed dirt, the lens broke into shards of glass. It made the most finalizing crunch as the glass fragments burst apart and imbedded in the earth.

The noise, the sight, the ache in my arms, and the hectic rhythm in my chest all brought on a wave of relief and a flush of tears down my cheeks. I tumbled forth on clumsy feet and Jessa pulled me in close, letting me put my face in her shoulder and hold tight to her sweater. My foggy mind was screaming out a frantic cry that grew louder with every heave of breath.

_Jessa tell me I’m good; please Jessa please; I did it; I tried; love me Jessa; please please please._

But if any of the words escaped through my voice, they all sounded like high little whimpers cried into her neck. She just held me, swayed back and forth and petting my hair with damp fingers, and the dogs nudged my sides in comfort and formed a protective hoop around us.

The panic left slowly, like air whizzing out of a balloon, and I then was deflated of energy and thought. As soon as I was calm, Jessa guided me around with a strong grip leashed to my arm and I followed on lazy feet, wiping away my tears and snot on my jacket sleeve along the way. The dogs waited dutifully beside the fence, glancing back and forth from us to the woods behind them.

Jessa led me over to the dead body, so eaten up that it looked more like roadkill than Mr. Newman. The smell still made bile creep up my throat, so I held my breath and tried not to cringe when Jessa grabbed the tattered remains of his coat and pulled his wallet from the pocket. The brown leather was stained with blood, but inside was more cash than I had ever seen at my age. The bills were crumpled and folded together as Jessa thumbed through them and pulled out three at random. She closed the wallet and shoved it into her back pocket, and then took my hand and pressed $30 into my open palm. She forced my fingers to clasp around the money when they just sat there limp.

_“Jessa?”_

My mind was coming through the haze and exhaustion was taking over. The sky was dark and the air was frigid. I had no idea what time it was or if I should be home by now, because my thoughts were still in orbit around Jessa and the dead body.

_“Don’t tell.”_

I wouldn’t, I was good at keeping secrets.

She put her hands on my ears and drew me in, tilting her head down to press her nose against mine. My eyes closed on reflex and a shuttering breath left my weighted lungs. It was the closest I ever got to kissing her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. There was a layer of snot and tears and blood on my face and pool of stomach acid in my mouth. Jessa wouldn’t have liked it. I wouldn’t have either.

_“Go home Jack.”_

So I followed her command, only looking back to watch her shoo the dogs into the forest with a sorrow goodbye, and then she ran off towards the other end of town. I walked home with the harsh air burning my face and chapping my wet mouth, and then I started sprinting when the streetlights came on.

The school pictures that ran in the paper never looked like Jessa, not the feral girl that I knew, and after a few weeks people stopped looking for her. Mr. Newman’s body was found soon after and it launched a huge scandal when police went through the archive of photos in his house. When people found out what kind of man he was, no one really cared about what had killed him. The town changed, people locked their doors at night, kids didn’t get to just wander around after school, police cruisers patrolled the residential streets, and we all grew up.

For weeks, months, and even years, I would go out to the woods behind the steel mill whenever I had the chance. The earth would forever bear the mark of the man that died there, even as plants wilted and snow fell and dandelions bloomed, the dark red dirt remained like a scar. But I would walk past it and go to the very edge of the brush to howl to Jessa’s dogs, and sometimes they howled back.


	2. No Tree on Earth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Quit cryin’,” you would say if you were here. “Or I’ll give you somethin’ too cry about.”
> 
> “Why do you even want me back?” I would ask.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the same universe as the previous chapter but with a different theme and focus.  
> Just another assignment I workshopped for class  
> I always love comments and criticism <3 :))

Madyson Willoughby

No Tree On Earth

The metal rim of the coin slot is jagged and bent. Fingers pressed to it, it cuts shallow grooves into my skin. The sting is warm, blooming heat and feeling back into my fingertips, and the pinpricks of blood smear across the glossy surface.

How long is that paper going to run, the one with my face on it and your number across the bottom? No one’s going to find me. I’ll tell you, go sit in one bus station for an hour, any hour of the night, and you’ll see that no one ever looks at runaways. And anybody who does isn’t looking to send us home.

I don’t know why you’re looking for me at all.

_Ring. Ring. Ring-_

“Hello?”

“Hey Daddy, it’s me. I ju-”

“Jessa where are you?”

Two towns over and then three bus rides south. Halfway to a city I’ve never been to.

“I took a bus north a couple hours, but it-”

Don’t breath too much, don’t back-step on small words, don’t go too fast. You can sniff out lies like a hound, I just have to talk like it’s the truth.

“Where the hell are you right now? I’m coming to get you.”

“I’m gon’na get on this train that goes east.”

My ticket points west, toward an ocean so wide that it doesn’t fit on a road map.

“I swear to God-above, if you don’t keep your ass right there-”

“I’m not coming back. You can’t make me if you can’t find me.”

_Click._

When I hang up, there’s a heavy weight pressing down on my chest. The skin around my eyes is hot and looks like a splotchy rash in the gleam of the phone. My fingers are still icy cold, especially pressed up against my cheeks.

“Quit cryin’,” you would say if you were here. “Or I’ll give you somethin’ too cry about.”

“Why do you even want me back?” I would ask.

  
Bus tires sink into a deep pit in the pavement and then spring back to the surface with a sharp jolt. The lurch travels through the frame and up the seats. It’s a shock like waking up from a dream that just stopped feeling real.

The saw blades always make this terrifying screech, like they’re crying out to be fed, and then chucks of wood are slid into their jaws and get crushed into a spray of splinters with a satisfied groan. And then the screeching starts all over again.

I’m hanging on this safety rail that no one pays attention to, with my cheek pressed into the cold metal bar. You’re far off, barking orders at boys that seem like men because I’m so young, and they feed in more wood to the screaming monster.

“Jessa stay here,” you had said as the truck rolled into a dirt lot. The carriage jostled as you stepped out and slammed the door, but then the car went still and cold with a fall chill.

It’s some kind of day with no school, so there’s nowhere for me to go while you’re at work. I thumped my feet against the seats as the hours passed slow, and then I got sick of that.

“Jessa go back to the truck,” You yell when you see me on the rail, and I hide my face into my hands.

I hear your steps come close like thunder claps roll through the clouds, and I peek through my fingers to see.

“Daddy I’m tired,” I say when you’re close enough to hear. It’s cold and too loud and I’m too tired to be hungry, so I just want to go home already.

“Sleep in the truck then,” and you grab me by the shoulder, your big hand clapping down so hard I can feel the hit down my arm, and twist me around with a push towards the car lot.

I walk away wanting say I’m too old to fall asleep in the truck, and I kick little rocks around along the way. There’s another screech, but this one is less the metallic cry of twirling blades, and more human. I turn around and watch some guy who works for you jump back from the machine, two fingers missing and a spray of blood settling across everything.

I’m far away but I see it. I’m far away but I feel it. And then I’m close up and those blades have my fingers in their hold, pulling me in and grinding me into splinters.

Bus tires sink into a deep pit in the pavement and then spring back to the surface with a sharp jolt. I blink my eyes open too fast and the light of early sun floods in. There’s a dent in my cheek where the edge of the window dug in and an ache in my neck from slouching.

With blurry eyes I look at my hands, counting my fingers over and over and coming up with ten every time. My heart slows gradually as the phantom screech of the sawmill fades into the hum of tires on the highway. I’m still tried but can’t sleep anymore.

The bus line ends near a rest stop with a payphone. I call but you don’t answer, and I don’t know what I would have said if you did.

  
_Ring Ring-_

A long stretch of quiet, deep like a cavern absent of light that goes on for miles.

“Jessa.”

“…”

“What’re you still callin’ for?”

A world that doesn’t move, or a reminder of what home sounds like. I can have one but not the other.

You’re sick of me, you’re tired of me looking back when I was the one that walked away. Like a feral dog that only comes home when she’s hungry.

After a long time, the dial tone starts to sound like I’m underwater. Just this dull roar winding through my head and drowning out everything else.

Did I hang up, or did you? I have my hand on the lever, fingering over the smooth metal and ready to press, or did I already? If I hung up then I meant to do it. But if you did then I know you meant it. It’s up to me to decide which is better.

“Well make up your mind, girl,” you would say. “Which one?”

“What if I don’t want either?” I would kick my feet out against the dashboard, angry because it doesn’t feel like a choice.

“Then you get nothing,” and then you’d smack me if I keep throwing a fit.

After a very long time, the dial tone sounds like nothing. Like empty air that doesn’t move and tastes sour. I slam the phone back into the cradle but it doesn’t shatter like I want it to. It makes a clatter against the metal and then slips off to hang by the cord. On the way to the bus station, I kick up dirt and pretend there’s someone here to tell me to stop.

  
Mountains rise and fall in steady slopes and sharp cliffs. Old roads turn to highways and then to interstates. Tall evergreens shrink with the disappearing soil and leaves flutter in the air like birds ready to take flight. Color fades from the skyline, until there’s a vast plane of emptiness running for eons along a grey ocean.

“Daddy I’m hungry,” I had said. No, maybe it was, “Daddy I’m still hungry.”

You huffed at me like old dogs bark at strangers, but “Daddy I’m still hungry.”

There was nothing left, like always, but “Daddy I’m still hungry.”

You swung out your arm and I flinched back, but instead of a smack you just held out your hand to me. It hung in the air, palm up and wavering like you were still going to hit me, but you held it there like I was supposed to see something in it. All over were these scars and lines cutting across, some scabbed over and some unhealed. There was tree-pitch stuck into the grooves and crevices like it was meant to be there.

“That’s what money is Jessa,” you said. “That’s what money is before it cares what you want.”

And then your hand struck out like a snake and left a pink welt across my jaw.

“Stop bitchin’” You said when I cried. “There’s no tree on earth that grows to make you happy, so don’t sit around cryin’ about it.”

For miles and miles, into the distance, there’s nothing but the sand and the sky and ocean, and thin air holding it all together.

The sand is dark and wet and cold as my feet sink in. Nothing could ever put roots in something so loose, it would just sink before it really starts to grow, or it could be swept away the ocean and carried off to somewhere better.

There are no trees here to care about anybody.

“Ain’t that the truth?” I would say, maybe to make you laugh, maybe to show I was listening back then. But you wouldn’t answer either way.

  
_Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring…_

The ring crests and falls like to the rhythm of the waves. You don’t answer and the dial tone sounds like the dull echo of a hollow seashell.

“Are you okay Jessa?” You wouldn’t say.

The ocean rears up and sends a spritz of icy cold sea water across my face. The salt stings my eyes until they flood.

“No,” I wouldn’t tell you.

“Do you want to come home now?” You’d never ask.

“Yeah,” But I’m not going to.

_Click._


	3. Pussy Willows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The dirt around is grainy with ash and burnt leaves, but the charred branches are still holding their pussy willows. The little cotton tuffs had just started to bloom and turn gold with pollen, late for the season, and now are slowly turning grey.

Madyson Willoughby

Pussy Willows

The ground is still damp with the remains of last night’s thunder storm and the mud sucks in his boot heels, leaving deep indents where he stands. The sun beats down, not near setting yet, and it will burn up all that moisture and leave the prints hardened into the dirt. Permanent, but only until the next heavy rain wipes them away.

Jessa leans on the fence and it creeks under her weight. She has her feet on the lowest beam, so she’s a whole head-and-a-half taller that Jack. One of her wolf-dogs sniffs across the ground, turning up wet clumps of dirt with his snout.

She speaks with her eyes, with bobs of her head and pointed shrugs of her shoulders, but Jack is still learning her language. So when Jessa tilts her head back insistently towards the trees, he stutter-steps on the invisible line between overgrown grass and forest dirt.

“C’mon.”

A few stray pine needles stick in the tangles of her hair, looking bright and vivid green with summer health. She swings her leg over the fence and takes long strides into the open door of the woods.

“I got’ta be home soon, or my mom…” His voice fades to mumbles and then quiet when Jessa doesn’t stop. She doesn’t even look back, just beacons with a flick her wrist over her shoulder.

Her dog jumps up to trail after her, circling her feet like she’s got a treat for him, and the two disappear into the blue shadows beneath the evergreens. And then Jack runs to catch up.

  
A tree seems to breathe before it falls. A dozen or so chops to one side, or a couple long slices with a with the curled teeth of a chainsaw, a shallow groove cut on the other side to let it break even, and a then beaver-tail slap to send it flying. And its last gasp for air is the rustling leaves as the branches reach out, grasping at other trees for help. The break creeks and squeals in protest, but with a slow and long sway for balance, the trunk comes down to the earth.

The body leaves an imprint in its bed, and its branches and leaves are shorn away in quick strikes, creating a halo of debris over its crown.

Long dowels with hooked ends are drove into its bark, where they catch on the tender flesh inside, and sap weeps out around the punctures. Chains loop around the body, adjustments are made, new trees staked out to rest in the bed, or a line is picked to domino if the fallers are feeling lucky or lazy, and the first tree of the season is drug away. It creates a grove in the dirt, a long shadow to signify its magnitude, cast by and uneven stump.

Children learn to count the rings in tree stumps like baby teeth. 86, 87, 88, older than any person they’ve ever known.

  
Jessa’s dog cries out a whiney little yelp and sneezes harsh huffs of air through his snout. It’s the one she insists is a puppy, even though Jack thinks he looks almost as big as her other dogs.

“Stupid,” Jessa thumps the dog on the head and pulls him back by the collar.

Prickly blackberry vines reach out like limp fingers across the ground, winding around trees and shrubs and reaching up for any sunlight they can find. Jack gets the hem of his pants snagged in the thorns and has to pick them off with careful fingers to free himself. Jessa’s better at evading them, walking on the balls of her feet and moving lighter through the rough trail.

But her dog, the puppy that’s too big to be one, snapped at a bee buzzing through the little blossoms and got a mouth full of sharp stickers and prickly leaves to show for it. Jessa gets him by the scruff when he won’t hold still and brushes the thorns off his jowls, while he licks her fingers like he’s saying sorry.

The other two dogs ran off a while ago, swerving through dirt trails and between trees and now hidden in the brush. But Jessa kept her little one from following, training him to stay close with short whistles and little clicks with her tongue, and smacking him lightly on the cheek when he doesn’t listen.

“He okay?” Jack asks, watching the dog roll his long tongue out and a few more thorns fall. He and the dog flank each of Jessa’s sides, following her lead through the woods.

“He’ll live,” Jessa says with a dry humor Jack doesn’t really pick up on.

The dog trots off after a moment, dragging his head through a soft patch of dirt to itch away the prickles. Jessa kicks a long branch out of the way and it flings back at her like a whip, slicing a shallow scrape across her ankle. A bead of red hits the ground, and then another. Theirs is a smattering of red marks across the dirt, looking like a heavy rainfall of blood.

“Jessa-Jessa,” Jack stutters in a panic.

He has this way of saying her name that straddles the line between strange and wrong. There’s a stutter between the _s_ ’s like he doesn’t know where to put his tongue, and he hangs on to the _a_ at the end like he can’t let it go. It could be a product of small town vernacular, a localized dropping of letters and conjoining of two words into one. Or it could be because he’s said her name to himself so often, _Jessa_ floating around his mind at every moment, that he stretches out every letter to make it last.

“What?” She doesn’t halt and barely gives a look over her shoulder.

There are little red berries dotting the thicket vines, some half green and some half purple, but most bright shiny red. A couple have tumbled to the ground and are rotting in the dirt or have been squashed to pulp by their feet.

“It’s poison,” he’s looking at her dog wide-eyed and afraid, like it should drop dead at any second.

Jessa turns with just her torso, not to the bush, but towards Jack with her mouth twisted to the side.

“Those are blackberries stupid.”

Her puppy charges on ahead like he’s fine, despite the good chunk of vine he bit into when he tumbled head first into the bush.

“But-but, when they’re red they’re poison,” Jack insists with only school yard knowledge to inform him. “Somebody ate one and died.”

“No. They didn’t,” Jessa isn’t particularly skeptical or interested, but Jack doesn’t drop it.

“Uh-huh, Charlie says he saw and-”

Jessa turns around all the way now, making Jack falter in his ramble and stumble in his step when she fixes him with a particularly mean look.

“They’re not poison stupid, so shud’up about it.” Jessa gets a cruel hold on the shell of his ear and twists it until it turns pink. “Now c’mon.”

She tugs on his ear and clicks her tongue, maybe unconsciously, and the puppy puts his head up at the noise.

“-But, somebody died. I know it,” Jack squirms his cheek into his shoulder, trying to escape her cold fingers.

“C’mere,” She swerves in their path and pulls him over to the thicket, the skin of his ear turning a painful white where her nails are digging in.

“Ow-ow-ow,” The pressure on his ear is starting to burn and he tugs at her sweater sleeve to make her let go.

Jessa plucks a red berry off the vine, it’s hard in her fingers like a little pebble, and she pushes it up against his mouth.

“Open,” she clicks her tongue again, right at the end of the command, and then moves her harsh pinch to his cheek when he doesn’t obey.

Lips shut tight, Jack pulls on her wrist with both hands but she won’t budge, and Jessa squeezes his cheek until his eyes blur over with tears. He shakes his head once, and then twice, and kicks his feet in the dirt helplessly when she won’t let go, and every rough twist pulls his skin more to the side.

Between a gasp of pain and a screech for help, Jessa pushes the berry into his mouth and claps her other hand over so he can’t spit it out.

“Eat it, c’mon,” She has this juvenile giggle rising up through her words, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

A pathetic groan seeps out from behind her hand as Jack rolls the berry around his tongue. It’s warm from Jessa’s skin and feels heavy for its size, and the little nodes are firm and rubbery, nothing like the way ripe blackberries melt in his mouth. But with Jessa’s hold still on him and her sharp eyes wearing him down, he feels as small as the berry between his teeth, and finally gives in and bites.

A strong bitter taste busts across his tongue and all the muscles in his face clench up in a pucker. The acid burns a loose tooth, one that’s prone to bleed if he fiddles with it enough, and it sends a sting of pain up his jaw. The pulp is grainy with seeds but he swallows anyway, has to or else sour ache will continue, and the little berry sits in his stomach heavy like a rock.

“There, see?” Jessa finally lets him go and puts her hands out in front of her like she’s revealing a magic trick.

He counts along with the rapid beat of his heart. 1-2-3-Dead. But nothing happens and he starts again, breathing shallow in a way that makes people drown in fresh air. 1-2-3-4-5-Dead. Nothing. 1-2-3-4-5-678910Dead. The hot sting of tears burns his eyes as he counts down his own end.

“Oh- Fuckin’ hell,” Jessa drops her arms in a huff, and then plucks another red berry from the vine.

“No don’t-!” He cries and covers his mouth with both hands. Two berries mean you die twice as fast. It must, he’s almost sure of it.

But Jessa pops the fruit in her mouth and it crunches between her front teeth. Her nose scrunches up like a rabbit, and her eyelashes flutter once, twice, and then again as she chews and swallows.

“There, see?” she repeats, and sticks her tongue out flat at him. In the center is red stain blooming like a rosy sunburn.

Jack touches his tongue tip to the seeds sticking in his teeth to dislodge them. The points are like splinters in his cheeks and he wants to spit them out, but Jessa’s watching, so he swallows them.

“Okay,” he finally concedes.

His heart is still beating fast, too fast, and he still counts along to it. But instead to death, he counts down to something he can’t quite figure out. It’s some sort of unshaped feeling, mixed up with fear and dread but also avid anticipation and longing, not all bad but not all good either. 1-2-3-Something. 1-2-3-4-5-Something.

“Now quit being a pussy,” Jessa commands and turns down the sloping path again. Her hand reaches back and a beckons him to follow with a flick of her wrist.

Jack wipes his eyes. 1-2-3-4-5-678910-Jessa.

Loaded onto trucks in bundles held together by chains, logs which were once trees which were once alive are carried up dirt roads and into gravel lots. Stripped already of branches, they get carved naked by long serrated blades. Debarking exposes stripes of uneven raw flesh, chipping around the edges and tacky with a lasting layer of sap, and the lumber is sent down miles of winding tracks within the mill.

With the power of automatic saws and the guidance of steady human hands, the trees are cut to shape, sliced into slats, and trimmed down to size. The circular saw offers a steady hum to the process, a heartbeat punctuated long screeches and deep groans as the blade twirls. Softwoods like cedar and pine cut like butter. Hardwoods cut like oak and maple cut like bone.

One carcass after another is fed through the conveyor, chopped into a thousand pieces that will never fit together again, and then sent off to other places to be sanded and varnished and branded and sold.

Stacked high in trucks, different from the ones they arrived in, boards are bound together by their type and size, and disappear down the highway. They finally rest in the skeleton of a building or the seat of a grandmother’s rocking chair, far from the dirt where their roots took hold.

  
With a series of anxious howls from the puppy and a few short barks towards the sky, Jessa’s other two dogs, a boy and a girl, finally appear from the brush. When they had chased each other into the brush earlier, Jessa had to hold the puppy back at the tree-line. The girl dog is panting like she’s overheating in the early summer breeze, but her tail is swaying back and forth steadily. The puppy rushes over to sniff her underbelly and between her hind legs.

“No.” Jessa commands loud and deep. She cuffs his ear and walks between the two like a barricade.

“What’d he do?”

With a yank on his elbow, Jessa pulls Jack up to walk beside her to keep the dogs apart.

“Got’ta keep him off’a her, it’s her bitch time.” He noses over to get a whiff and Jessa shoves his snout the other way.

“What?”

“Dogs don’t know better,” Jessa says like Jack gets her meaning. “Doesn’t matter to them if he’s her baby.”

Sometimes Jessa would say things and Jack couldn’t quite put together. Like she spoke in puzzle pieces but he doesn’t know what the pictures supposed to be.  
“Whas’sa bitch time?” The fifth grade schoolyard is full of fucks and shits and bitches, and a hundred other words that Jack is still learning, but Jessa says ‘bitch’ different than he’s ever heard it.

“When a dog can have puppies,” Jessa pats her bitch’s neck and rubs her ears. Her tongue curls around the word puppies like it’s something sweet.

Jack watches her lips move like there’s a secret behind them. Like it’s the missing piece to that mystery puzzle. It takes him a whole minute just to get his mind back on track.

“But a bitch is…”

At school a bitch is a teacher that gives out too much homework. In town, a bitch was that lady who didn’t turn around when some guy drove buy and honked at her. At home, a bitch was his mom when she and Daddy would start yelling at each other. It’s a word that doesn’t seem to have a concrete meaning, just a mood and tone that hangs around it. One of those untranslatable words that get used enough to be important.

“Dog bitches and girl bitches are different things,” Jessa says because she’s fluent in the things that seem just beyond Jack’s reach. He knows she’s smart, but in a way that can’t be measured at school. Smart about things like dogs and blackberries and bad words.

“Different how?”

Beside him, the puppy tries to sneak his way around again and Jack gives a push on his thick neck in the other direction, like he’d seen Jessa do. But the dog throws his head back, snaps his jaw with a deep snarl in his snout and Jack flinches back.

Jessa grabs his shoulder and pulls him away quick, switching their places so she’s between Jack and the dog. Her hand looks so small when she puts it on the dog’s head, but she shoves it down and keeps his nose to the dirt. Again she clicks her tongue, sharp and clear like a smack to the cheek, and he keeps his head bowed even after she lets go.

Jack watches like disciples gaze at miracles.

“A bitch is a girl you don’t like,” Jessa says after a moment, eyes still fixed on her puppy-dog to keep him in line.

With a whistle and a point outwards, she sends her other dogs two off into the woods and the puppy stays by her side.

A-girl-you-don’t-like, like it’s all one word.

“A slut is a girl you don’t love,” she tacks on like it’s a handy piece of information he’ll need to know. As if the two words go hand-in-hand.

A-girl-you-don’t-love.

They wander into a bright beam of light that cast down warmth and hurts their dilated eyes. The glare fades and they blink their sight back to see an open space in the treetops that reveals the sky, bright blue with milky clouds and sunlight bouncing in every direction, opened by a tall willow tree that has been split right down the middle. The fracture ends where the stump meets the earth and the roots begin, leaving the heavy trunk hanging precariously in midair in a deep V shape. Its insides are burnt along the marks of its age, and the jagged imprint of a lightning strike shows blackened up the middle, reflected on both sides of the split tree.  
Its roots set in an uneven bluff, a steady incline up to its precipice and then a steep hill on the other side, leading to the edge of a cliff beside the river. The dirt around is grainy with ash and burnt leaves, but the charred branches are still holding their pussy willows. The little cotton tuffs had just started to bloom and turn gold with pollen, late for the season, and now are slowly turning grey.

“Jessa?” Jack says, and then again when she doesn’t hear, “Jessa?”

“What?”

She gets closer to the willow and Jack follows. Jessa puts her hand up to the tree, touches its inside where the electric current struck its path. Her fingers trace over the black lines like roads on a map, trailing from one root to another to another.

“You’re—um, you’re not neither…” He fiddles with the edge of his sleeve, teasing the little fibers until they start to unravel, with his eyes cast to the ground and hot burn crawling up his face.

Jessa turns, one heel stuck in the ground and another wedged in the groove of the split willow. There’s a crease in between her eyebrows and her another in her nose, in that rabbit way in scrunches up, and her lips are quirked curiously.

“Of those things,” He feels a knot tie up in his throat and he can’t get any more words past it.

With one hand still on the tree Jessa reaches her other out to bridge the gap, and Jack can feel her palm just barely skim over his cheek and it feels revealingly cold on his red skin. And then she flicks her wrist and cuffs him on the ear with a limp hand.

The hit vibrates down his jaw and sends an ache into his loose tooth again. It stings like red blackberry acid.

“Shud’up,” she commands, tongue popping on the p.

  
Scraps, stray shards, uneven ends, rounded edges, and the like, pile up in trenches beside the conveyer belts. Some pieces still have little flecks of bark clinging to the flesh, or imperfect divots from irregular growth, or even little bundles of spider eggs nested in hidden pores. Cut into useless slabs that don’t quite belong anywhere, these scraps keep the last remnants of the forest. Carrying them in the layers of woodgrain like mementos from home.

End of day, end of week, or when they’ve just piled up to high to work around, the scraps are gathered up and sent into the wood chipper. The broad funnel mouth roars instead of screeches, open wide and showing a jaw full of short hooked blades. The teeth are dull, in color and edge, and rusted around the axis. Precision is not required to chew up scraps and spit out chips, so the blades wear down and the engine gets faulty but neither are replaced.

A misting of fine splinters casts a hazy glow in the air, before settling like dust upon every surface near. The gnarled hunks of lumber shoot out from the back end, creating an anthill fifty feet high.

Some portion will be pressed into cheap plywood and sold by the ton. Some other portion will be pulped and shredded and pulped again, until it can be worked into paper and printed into more money that the lumber mill will ever see. Most of it will remain in a pile, until rot and fungus eats what’s left.

  
“Here, feel.”

Jessa grabs his hand and holds it to the scar running up the tree. She lays her fingers over his and guides them across the sharp groove of blackened wood. Little trails of burns branch outwards from the center and narrow into thin veins.

Splinters around the edges arch up in defense, trying to protect the open wound as best they can. As sap slowly weeps from the trunk, the little chips have dried into sharp pins that catch easy in young skin. When a few flecks catch in the thin webbing between his fingers, Jack bites the inside of his lip to keep quiet. His skin flares pink where the shards dig in, but he keeps his hand in place under hers.

He wonders if lightning could split open people like this, right down the middle and leave an imprint on their insides. The thought tumbles through his mind for a bit, finding its place between awe and curiosity, and a distant fear that only imaginary death could have. But then it drifts away and Jack thinks of the way Jessa’s fingers press so firmly against his own. The center of her palm is burning hot against the back of his hand, radiating an energy that he is sure could sear through his skin. And then he imagines that they’ll leave their own mark on the tree, a black imprint of her hand pressed over his, with the lightning bolt running up the center. He presses harder into the tree, intent to leave something that will last forever.

A cold nose nudges Jessa’s side with a whine, and then nudges Jack’s with a more persistent groan. And in that way that young dogs can be smarter than young humans, the tree responds with a terrifying creek, and then a crack-crack-crack.

Jack can feel little tremors under his fingers as the wood fibers snap from the stump, and then Jessa can feel the world tilt forward when her foothold in the split slips and the earth opens below. The children stumble back, Jessa steady on her feet and Jack lucky to catch her arm on the way down, and the dog dashes to the side with its tail tucked in and head down.

The tree splits further, upturning roots and cracking the stump into a jagged edge, and then it all falls under its own weight. The leaves rustle like a cry, fingers out stretched for balance, and one side finds stability in the arms of an ancient oak tree nearby. Branches snap and fall, but the body stays in place, angled up toward the tree tops in a deep slope.

The other half falls unhindered to the ground with a deafening thump, and leaving a curved dent in the softer patches of dirt. A shake travels across the forest floor, vibrating up through other trees and shrubs, jostling bird nests, and rising up through the children’s feet to rattle their skeletons.

The fall turns up a layer of ash that clouds the air, and the impact makes the dying pussy willows release their pollen in a great buoyant puff. A pale grey cloud swirls around in the sunlight, sticking to the children’s clothes and stinging their eyes to tears.

As soon as their ears quit ringing and the echo fades into the air, Jessa jumps over an upturned root, one that looks like a crooked elbow arching up from the earth, and Jack feels an impatient tug on his hand. Jessa has still got his fingers tangled in hers in one big twisted knot that makes his stomach cramp up, and she pulls him forward with a casual tug, like she doesn’t even mind holding his hand for the moment.

They come to the side to the fallen half, looking like a carcass waiting to be eaten by flies, and they lay their hands upon it again. There’s a residual heat and vibration in its center that crawls up their arms like an electric buzz, the feeling of young amazement to see that they could make the world tremble.

Jack’s fingers explore over the burns and cracks under them, decoding some hidden message in lightning bolts and woodgrain. He migrates from one side to the other, following the sharp juts of the burn all the way to the far edge. The bark chips and crumbles into a black char that stains his fingers, and with each brush of his thumb, Jack peels away another burnt layer. His stubby nails dig into the bark and try to break off a chunk to go with a small collection of blue river rocks and speckled feathers, a cluster of things that seem important and beautiful. Things that Jessa has taught him to notice.

The puppy noses his wide head between them, makes Jack shuffle forwards to give him room, and their conjoined hands hang over his snout. He sniffs the tree and its open wound, snuffles at the ash and dips his head to the dirt to sneeze.

Jessa’s squeezing his fingers like she’s trying to feel the bones inside, rubbing his skin like she’s trying to start a fire, and Jack lets his hand hang limp in hers even when it starts to hurt. When he looks up to her she’s looking back at him, lips quirked like a teacher waiting for her students to understand something, and Jack feels that nervous thrill crawl up his spine again.

1-2-3-4-5-678910-

“Jessa-” he tries to twist on his foot in that easy way she does, tries say something in that easy way she does, but can’t quite get it right.

Her free hand comes up, sleeve rolling down her wrist as she reaches over, cupping the air near his cheek but not quite touching it. She’s going to hit him again, Jack thinks, and his face scrunches up in a wince. He hooks his fingers in the tree bark, like an anchor to hold him steady through something that will hurt more inside than on his skin.

But instead of the slap of her palm, he feels the soft dirt under his feet shift as the tree lurches. It’s resting just far enough on the top of the bluff that the touch of curious fingers can set it off balance.

It begins like a gentle slide, gravity pulling on the trunk with invisible puppet stings, slow but sudden enough that Jack feels his ankle roll with the movement. And then there’s a rough yank on Jack’s arm, from where his fingers are clasped tight to one side and a shock of pain shoots up his to his shoulder. The near edge of the trunk rears up and bucks quickly, scraping long pink swaths across his stomach and chest as it rolls, and Jack gets pulled into the building momentum.

One second he feels the terrifying sensation of his feet leaving the ground, no traction to be found in patchy mud. Then in the next his head, shoulders, and chest get thrown forward and down. The bridge of his nose smacks into the wood, leaving a messy blood stain on the blackened surface. The tree crests in its roll, ready to plunge down the bluff with potential speed and unimpeded by the slight weight of a child hanging on too tight. And Jack sees the ground beneath him, just an instant before the fall, where he imagines his skull will crack and his head will be squashed like a firm red blackberry.

Jessa’s still holding his hand, but from the way it latches on, it’s like she has talons. Her other hand loops around his neck at the last second, nails dug into his collar bone and wrist pressed to his windpipe, and his scream of fear becomes a gasp for breath. She doesn’t play tug of war with the tree, she fights dirty to drag Jack backward. When the grip on his hand proves weak, she claws up his arm to get his shoulder in a vice grip. When the current of motion proves too heavy for her arms, Jessa throws herself backward into dirt and yanks Jack down with her.

Just before the world flipped over on him, and his head splattered across the forest floor, Jack lands half on Jessa and half in the dirt with each shoulder aching and fingers tingling with a distant hurt. The hand on his neck drops to reach around his chest, drawing his back to her front and locking them in place.

The half-tree twists, rolls, lands flat-side down with a bouncing thud, and then the deep slope of the bluff takes it down. The truck rolls a few more times as speed builds, and it runs over a few shrubs that slow but do not stop its descent. In a loud and tumbling rout toward the river bed, it finally falls down a deep slope of eroded dirt, and the branches make a wet crash when they hit the water.

The whole forest seems to need a moment to settle, dirt and pebbles skidding down the bluff in the tree’s wake. Sun bleeds through the hole in the treetops, light touching places that have never seen it. Birds hidden nearby fly away from the crash in a flurry, and then discreetly fly back to evade danger.

There’s this wheezing noise hovering around them, and Jack doesn’t realize until his voice crackles that it’s coming from him. His lungs draw in air and expel a sobbing cry back. He touches his face with shaky hands and feels cold tear tracks running down hot skin. That distant pain in his fingers becomes a furious sting, and he feels blood running down them and creating a wells between his fingers.

One of his fingernails has ripped in half and a sharp angle and another two have been torn off altogether. The pink skin underneath is wrinkled and wet, and a steady flow of blood seeps from the tender wounds. Mixed with the blood is smudges of ash and, and there’s a scattering of splinters prickling his open flesh. Jack can feel the hurt pulsing in rhythm with his heart beat, and the smell of blood heats up the air and leaves an acrid taste in the back of his mouth.

Jack holds his hand out in empty space, spine stiff and shoulders arched, holding as still as he can but there’s a persisting vibration in all his limbs. His chest hiccups and gallops with hungry sobs that eat up all his air, making his mind blurry with lasting fear.

The forest settles, quiets, and finds a new balance, but Jack howls with tears.

A wide pink tongue licks up his wrist, from a muzzle with gleaming teeth and furred jowls. Jessa’s puppy-dog sniffs the blood like a treat he’s never tasted before, and then he laps at the pools in between his fingers. The licks aren’t gentle, they slap into his skin and press demandingly into the bleeding sores, and when Jack flinches back the puppy snarls.

“Don’t-” Jessa mumbles right near his ear, leaning her chin on his shoulder and pushing her dog’s nose away. She leans over him, arms coming around his shoulders protectively, and her hand curls around his gentle like she’s cupping broken bones.

She looks over Jack’s fingers, at the raw pink skin that’s seeping blood. She checks his shoulder that feels overstretched and sore, she looks at a deep welt left on his neck from her grasp, and she traces over a purpled pinch mark in his cheeks. Her lips puff out with a breath that feels cold on his wet face, and tries to wipe away the bruise like it’s a smudge of ash.

Jack turns his face away, shame piggy-backing on fear. No matter how he tries to hold his breath and calm his heart, the sobs keep jumping up his chest and his eyes feel irritated and sticky as the tears run free.

“Hey…” Jessa whispers like it’s only for him, not even letting the trees or earth can hear.

A firm thumb presses into his cheek and turns his face back towards her, no matter how miserably he tries to resist. When she gets him to turn, her hand remains on his wet face.

“Don’t cry, don’t be a pussy,” She says, but her thumb wipes away the tears like it’s okay.


	4. The Space Between

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The space between us.

Madyson Willoughby

The Space Between 

The space between my two front teeth. Where words get caught like blackberry seeds. The space between your eyes. A scar to bridge the gap, thin and pale like a strand of spider web. 

The space between my fingertips and the top shelf. Stretching up as high as I can, feet arched and aching, and then dropping down with a breath and a thump. Every day I come closer, nails just beginning to tip-tap against the edge, but I still can’t reach. The space between the table and the kitchen floor. The glow of gold light streaming though the tablecloth. Every day it gets smaller, harder to hide in, but I still fit.

The space between the road and the trees. A deep trench you can jump over but I fall into. My toes dig into the sloped edge and the loose dirt falls with my feet. The space between reaching out to you and grabbing nothing. The space between asking for help and you watching me fall again. 

The space between too old and too young, where lightning strikes and we’re too much of everything. Too much and nowhere to keep it, too little to save it for later. The space between your fingers when you grasp at the wind. The space between my fingers when you slip away.

 

The space between the links in the fence. We could slip our hands through, now just our fingers through.

The space between us.

When you’re on the other side                                        and                                        I can’t reach.

The space between your fingers. Holding your hand. Holding on for dear life.

Holding on too tight. _Holding on too tight_.  _Holdingontootight._   _Holdingontootight.Holdingontootight._

R e l e a s e . G o o d b y e .

C o m e b a c k .

 

The

space

between

pine needles on their branch.

Where

the wood divots in or perks out.

Where

it will either grow into a new branch.

Where

it will grow its own needles

and

have its own spaces in between them. 

Or

it will deepen into a grove

that

bends to the will of rain and wind,

until

it snaps under its own weight.

But

for a short time,

it’s just the space between.

 


	5. Write a Story about Dogs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wonder if you’ll ever write it or if it’s just an idea with a title and an author.

Madyson Willoughby

Write a Story About Dogs

Think of a something after you turn out the light but before you go to bed. Stand in the dark by the light switch, ruminating. Turn the light back on. Write it on a piece of paper that is titled, authored, but otherwise blank.

Three stray dogs sneak into a hospital and live there undetected for many years. They eat applesauce and liverwurst from the garbage that smells like food, they avoid the garbage that smells like chemicals. They lie all day in the highest west wing hallway, where a wide skylight lets in the sun. It’s an abandoned hall, closed for renovations the budget didn’t allow for. At twilight the dogs howl in the chapel, only when no one comes to pray. The sound is more like phantoms than angels.

Wonder if something is wrong with your typewriter. Pull up the K key when it stickkkkkkkkks. Avoid words with the letter K just in case. Stop typing and pick up a pen instead. Commit to fix your typewriter tomorrow, and then forget.

Wonder if there’s something wrong with your hands. Cross out words spelled ~~finetickly~~ ~~phineticly~~ phonetically. Commit to sending an apology to your editor, and then forget.

The three dogs,

But maybe two is better. Three is a solid number, like a sturdy doorstop holding open the gates of memory. People remember three’s, three blind mice, three gorgons, the Holy Trinity, past present and future. But it also invokes power, and the imbalance of it, it’s not a fair share, it’s not even.

One of the dogs would be left out. The third wheel. The black sheep. Should they be sheep? No, dogs. Would they all think differently, or would they think at all? Would they be a we or an I? or several I’s and a you and a them? They could have a hive mind. Should they be bees?

Take a sip of late-night coffee. When you brewed it, you don’t know. Sometimes you need to walk around between words, sometimes you need to do something else with your hands. So you make coffee. Wait for it to go cold on the bedside table, and then take a sip.

Take a sip and remind yourself you're writing about dogs.

The two dogs sleep all day under the beds of the very old patients in the east wing. These patients are in various stages of dementia, leukemia, Parkinson’s, etc. The dogs don’t understand these conditions, but the patients smell familiar, like grass a few days before it turns dry and brown, or warm milk before it goes sour.

So the dogs make an improvised den with old sheets and gauze under an occupied bed and sleep there for a few days. And when the bed is empty, they sniff the cold mattress and move on. Sometimes the old people see the dogs but for some reason they don’t tell the nurses.

Make a note to think of a reason why. It feels important that the old people know the dogs are there. It’s important that the dogs lick their hands before the old people die. Try to think of a reason why.

One night in December, the dogs are sleeping under an old man’s bed and they smell something like burnt air and wet dirt. Something like piss and shit and skittering prey. They pop their heads out on each side and the old man is having a heart-attack, half asleep but desperately thrashing.

The dogs start barking into the halls.

Do they hesitate? Would they hesitate?

The dogs start barking into the halls and a nurse comes running. She screams and more nurses come. Some of them attend to the old man.

Does he die anyway? Should he?

Some other people call a dog catcher, an exterminator, the pound, but the dogs are too feral. One dies by accident. It gets looped in a catch pole and bites a hand that comes to close. It runs off with the pole clattering behind. It turns into a doorway and the pole gets caught long ways. The dog tumbles forward and its neck snaps under its own momentum.

The other dog escapes to the uppermost hallway in the west wing. It lays out under the skylight as the sun rises. It doesn’t get up to eat. It dies.

The end is something like that.

Or, it’s not.

Put the half-story down. Read it tomorrow. Read it every day. Wonder if you’ll ever write it or if it’s just an idea with a title and an author.


End file.
